A ballot on the EU could leave the UK as boxed in as ever

Would the British people vote to ratify a treaty clearly demoting them to
second-class members?

One of the wisest things ever said about Britain’s vexed relations with the European Union came in a speech in 1999 by that great Europhile, Roy Jenkins. “There are,” he told his audience, “only two coherent British attitudes to Europe. One is to participate fully, and to endeavour to exercise as much influence and gain as much benefit as possible from the inside. The other is to recognise that Britain’s history, national psychology and political culture may be such that we can never be anything but a foot-dragging and constantly complaining member, and that it would be better, and would certainly produce less friction, to accept this and to move towards an orderly, and if possible, reasonably amicable separation.”

Today this seemingly intractable problem is again rearing its head, with rising clamour for a referendum on “Europe” which even David Cameron seems to accept may be inevitable. But when will it be held, and what might the question be? What is bringing this to a head, of course, is the decision of our Brussels colleagues, as they desperately struggle to save the doomed euro, to go all out for a new treaty, designed to take them a huge further step towards “full political and fiscal union”. If, as expected, they agree this at December’s European Council, the treaty will take at least a year to negotiate, followed by a long and contentious ratification process, which would take us beyond Britain’s next general election.

This would suit Mr Cameron because he hopes that, by promising us a referendum without saying what the question might be, he may be able to placate his own Eurosceptics and spike the guns of Ukip. He is also under pressure to demand the repatriation of powers from Brussels to Britain, which would also have to be included in a new treaty. He could then go to the country, he imagines, promising a referendum on a treaty that will offer his Eurosceptics at least some of what they want.

Mr Cameron’s hopes could be dashed, however, if his EU colleagues insist that the only purpose of their new treaty is to create the “political and fiscal union” that they imagine will save the euro – and that this is no time to be distracted by British demands for repatriation of powers (which would contravene, anyway, the EU’s core principle that powers, once surrendered, cannot be handed back). So we might be presented with a treaty that involved only a further surrender of powers by the countries within the eurozone, that gave Mr Cameron nothing of what he is asking for, excluded Britain from the EU’s integrated core and placed us even more obviously in its outer ring.

Would the British people then vote to ratify a treaty so clearly demoting us to second-class members of the club? The last thing Mr Cameron wants is to incur his European colleagues’ odium by giving us a chance to vote “No” in a way that could be seen as an attempt to veto a treaty that did not directly concern us.

If the EU’s leaders are clever, therefore, they might agree to enough token demands to allow Mr Cameron to claim he had got something, at least, that might change Britain’s relationship with the EU in the direction the Eurosceptics are calling for. But it wouldn’t amount to much.

The Eurosceptics would be mad, however, to seek a referendum on a straight choice of “in” or “out”. Though polls currently show that a majority want Britain to leave the EU, a campaign in which the leaders of all three major parties argued the case for staying in might well produce a repeat of 1975. Then, such a campaign dramatically reversed an earlier 2-to-1 poll majority in favour of getting out of the Common Market.

The irony, as I have observed before, is that the only way Mr Cameron could get what he and so many Eurosceptics claim to want is by using the one device which would compel the rest of Europe to negotiate with Britain. This would be to invoke Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty (supposedly written in with Britain in mind) which requires the EU by law to negotiate with a member state wanting a new relationship. But this can only be triggered by that country saying that it wishes to leave the EU –something that Mr Cameron could never bring himself to ask for.

He may manage to avoid “Europe” becoming an issue at this week’s party conference by promising to make a major speech on the subject later this year. But he is still boxed in. He may eventually have to give us a referendum on a treaty which, in effect, is condemning us to stay in the EU as a second-class member, and to exercise even less influence in its affairs than we do now. How would we all vote then?

Lufthansa wakes up to the danger of intoxicating fumes in the cockpit

The German press has lately been excitedly reporting on an admission by Lufthansa that, in 2010, an Airbus flight landing at Cologne only narrowly avoided a major disaster when its two pilots were severely incapacitated by toxic fumes from air circulated into the airliner from its engines.

Back in June 2007, I was reporting here how dozens of similar incidents affecting aircrew had been covered up because many airliners draw cabin air from their engines, contaminated by organophosphate (OP) chemicals used to reduce engine wear. Several senior pilots who were forced to retire early after suffering in this way had teamed up with expert scientists and doctors to expose this system’s potentially disastrous effects. But they met with blanket denials from the officialdom and aviation industries of Britain, the US and Australia, because these tricresyl phosphates had been officially approved as safe. Any admission of the problem could have set off an avalanche of compensation claims.

In the 1990s, I ran a long campaign here to expose a similar cover-up of the tragedy befalling thousands of sheep farmers whose health and lives were destroyed after they were forced to dip their animals in OP compounds similarly licensed by the Government as safe to use. I was eventually able to reveal a secret report confirming this by the Health and Safety Executive, but suppressed for the same reason when John Gummer was agriculture minister.

Lufthansa may now have caused a stir in Germany by announcing that its A380 airliner fleet is to be “upgraded” to end the risk from these “oil fumes”. But it has not yet come clean about the mass of scientific evidence (reported in my book Scared to Death) which links the problem directly to the tricresyl phosphates still being pumped into airliners carrying millions of passengers a year.

Debunking climate propaganda earns you a 'fail’

Two weeks ago I described one of this year’s A-level General Studies papers which asked candidates to discuss various “source materials” on climate change. Drawn from propaganda documents wholly biased in favour of climate alarmism, these contained a plethora of scientific errors. I suggested that, if any clued-up students tore these “sources” apart as they deserved, they might have been given a “fail”.

Sure enough, an email from the mother of just such a student confirmed my fears. Her son is “an excellent scientist” who got “straight As” on his other science papers, but he is also “very knowledgeable about climate change and very sceptical about man-made global warming”. His questioning of the sources earned an “E”, the lowest possible score. His mother then paid £60 for his paper to be re-marked. It was judged to be “articulate, well-structured” and clearly well-informed, but again he was marked down with “E” for fail.

This young man’s experience speaks volumes about the way the official global-warming religion has so corrupted our education system that it has parted company with proper scientific principles. In his efforts to reform our dysfunctional exam system, Michael Gove should ask for this bizarre episode to be investigated.

Whopper of a fisherman’s tale

Anyone with a scintilla of knowledge of fishing might have been staggered to see a recent newspaper report that there are only “100 adult cod left in the North Sea”. This was copied by other newspapers, using that familiar weasel mantra “according to scientists” (one headline read simply “Only 100 cod left in North Sea”).

All this was so patently absurd that the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs issued a correction. The best estimate for the number of adult cod remaining in the North Sea, it said, is “21 million”. So eager were all these papers to promote the scare that they got their figure wrong by 21 million per cent. Does this set a new world record for a margin of journalistic error?